Tuesday, January 8, 2013

The View From The MLA

In a sense, the annual convention of the Modern Language Association is a reverse diaspora: an entire interrelated village of academics appears overnight out of nowhere, not unlike Brigadoon. Not surprisingly, then, there is much meeting and greeting and conviviality, and, as Mary Ann has already reported, the Tenants were "at home" and receiving visitors at the Fairmont. Although the hotel's resident dog may have snubbed us, other people did not, and at least one of the Tenants managed to secure an invitation to the Norton party, held on the 50th floor of the Prudential Building, which had a nice view:

With apologies for the reflections on the glass.

The Tenants were surprised by how much Boston looks like Morgantown.

Other interesting happenings:

Rumor has it that the Delegate Assembly spent fifteen minutes discussing a comma.

Because the various hotels were connected by a skyway lined with highend shops, someone actually said, "We turn left here at Michael Kors," a sentence that very few people other than Heidi Klum have ever uttered.

The current conundrum seems to be how one abbreviates Object-Oriented Ontology, with some people referring to it as "Triple O" and others calling it OOO (pronounced "ew"). One acquaintance of Colson Hall speculated on what the abbreviation would be if the field of study were actually Pre-Oedipal-Object-Oriented Ontology, but the Tenants, above such vulgarity, paid her no mind.